


Relativity.

by orange_crushed



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Death, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Marauders' Era, Nobody is Dead, Time Loop, Time Travel, Time Turner, Time is a Flat Circle and Other Multiverse Problems
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-20
Updated: 2015-01-30
Packaged: 2018-03-08 09:47:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3204743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sirius has often thought about the first time they saw each other, on a train platform, one of them with half a dozen monogrammed suitcases piled up on a trolley pushed by elves, and the other with one battered suitcase carried in hand. He has thought about the way they ended up sharing a carriage by sheer luck, when nobody would sit with either of them for opposite reasons, when they tried to show off to each other with their best charms work and both were rotten. Every time Sirius thinks about it, it feels less like coincidence, and more like the universe rotating slowly with inscrutable intent. Things that happen, and happen again and again, for a reason. </p><p>Like tides, like spring: an act of God.</p><p>(<i>This fic is on an indefinite hiatus. Many apologies</i>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

There are a million little worlds like this one. They differ in degrees- chances, choices. Opportunities. Divergent outcomes. Sirius knows all that. From a book balanced on Moony's thigh as he slept, a text for his night classes; he takes especially good notes and writes down the lectures and sells them to pay for his books, and then he takes notes from the books and the cycle goes round and round. Remus is convinced that muggle physics is going to yield amazing developments when applied to arithmancy, but so far he has only managed to make a very beautiful multifaceted snowflake the size of a large terrier, which Sirius accidentally put his hand and face through.

"That was the death of universes," Remus had said, but he'd smiled when he said it. Sirius had pulled him off the couch for a cold kiss. Right now Sirius is trying to figure out what this strange little book means and why it so fascinates him. Remus told him it was someone's many-worlds interpretation as opposed to a Copenhagen one, which at the time Sirius thought had something to do with travelogues and Hans Christian Anderson. He's glad he didn't say that out loud and humiliate himself.

"Are you awake?" he asks his Moony, almost in a whisper. Remus's hair is flat on one side where it's been pressing the sofa too intimately. His breath smells like the garlic from dinner and he is maybe, definitely, drooling a little. The book is slipping down, the pages wrinkling. Sirius takes it off his knee. "Are you awake?" Sirius asks again, louder, hedging for a yes.

"No," mumbles Remus. "Very not."

"Well," says Sirius, "there must be a world where you and I are going out for ice cream. Can it be this one?"

It can.

 

 

 

"I'll be home on Thursday," Remus says. "I won't even have to sleep in a freezing barn this time. Moody's word of honor." He speaks lightly and he's packed lightly. Everything for show. Sirius's guts feel lined with lead but he grins anyway and puts his hands in his pockets and swallows the panic that always visits at these moments. These partings. Damn the war to woolly bogie-flavored hell. Remus leans forward and Sirius catches his kiss in the air halfway, presses him into the door again. They break apart unsteadily. "If I ever do manage to leave," Remus adds. He's touching his mouth with his fingertips.

"Store them up," says Sirius. "Or don't. I have more." 

"More," Remus murmurs, "like that?"

Thursday comes back like it's supposed to, but Remus doesn't. Sirius owls James and Peter and Frank hysterical messages in his own sloppy code and they all tell him the same thing: have a drink and go to bed, and it'll all be sorted by the morning. It's comforting. But Sirius lies awake all night and listens to his neighbors open and close their back doors, turn off their television sets, start their cars. There are scratching noises on the windowsill when the birds settle in for the night, and again when they wake in the morning. The flat creaks and sighs when it thinks he isn't listening.

Nothing happens on Friday.

 

 

 

Remus is gone for eleven days.

Dumbledore gives Sirius his word that things are fine, just proceeding a little more slowly than expected. He tries to feed Sirius candy, which Sirius doesn't eat. It's very confusing. Sirius waits as patiently as is possible for him. When Remus has been gone for thirteen days Minerva shows up behind the Hammer & Tongs while Sirius, James and Peter are retching into the garbage cans from too much shandy. She has a job and some motherly advice for their stomachs but no news. Sirius couriers a package up past Manchester and meets three new Order members holed up there in a farmhouse. He asks around about a man, sandy hair, this tall, weird scar on his- no, of course you haven't, thanks anyway mate. He goes across the countryside, visiting a few towns that he knows the Order's got contacts in: he drums up the regulars and holds up a picture and nobody says anything useful. It takes him almost a week, moving under cover and back-tracking and getting maudlin drunk in country pubs. When he gets home he checks the mail for messages and then the neighbor's mail and James and Lily's mail and there is nothing at all.

Remus is gone for nineteen days. Twenty. November arrives silently, sullenly, sheeted in ice and damp with dirty rain and breathing softly so as not to wake the war. Sirius gets a slice taken out of his arm in a fight and Peter gets a bolt to the head that leaves him speaking only Pig Latin for three hours. James takes in Parkinson for questioning all on his own, still bleeding and half-stunned in a field. And there are deaths, vanishings, names he doesn't recognize printed into lists in the _Daily Prophet_. Remus's lease nearly runs out and Sirius pays it for another full year, the lousy dump. Sirius spends all his time there, pulling grocery notes and bookmarks out of everything, smoking cheap muggle cigarettes compulsively the way he's not allowed to do when Remus is home. Trying to find a sign. A clue, a trace. Remus is gone for twenty-five days. Thirty. Thirty-six. Everybody claims ignorance. Sirius scrys for Remus using his hairbrush and his toothbrush and his favorite shirt and the map burns up completely, leaving a scorch on the floor. Sirius apparates halfway across the country again, treks across large muddy parts of it, carrying that same sloppy drawing of Remus's face. He asks for him everywhere he goes. He stops in pubs and inns and farmer's markets; villages and towns and hamlets. It's obvious and dangerous but he's past caring. Nobody's met him. There are no answers. Dumbledore stops taking his daily owls.

Lily takes Sirius aside, red-eyed and too gentle, and tells him to start thinking about, you know, and he doesn't know, not at all. 

"I want him back," he tells Dumbledore, in front of Minerva and Arthur and everyone, all the grownups at their grown-up meeting. They stare at him in a mixture of pity and embarrassment. They drop their papers and maps and pretend to study them, to disappear from the middle edges of the table. "Wherever you sent him, bring him back. Or I'll go myself."

"My dear boy-"

"And if he's dead," Sirius snaps, starts to shout, "have the stones to tell me!" His voice cracks like an egg and he swallows the pieces. He's actually shaking. "I want him back."

"There is no way back," says Dumbledore. His eyes are cool, like cloudy water. Nothing is given away. "There is only a way forward."

"Fuck you," says Sirius. 

 

 

 

Seventy-three days. That's how long he can live in this version of the world, the one without Remus. He has already done a spell he promised Remus he'd never do again, the one he used to find Regulus, Regulus's body, but it didn't work. It leaves him sick for days afterwards. Sirius crawls to the bathroom and dreams feverishly curled up against the cold side of the tub, and wonders if his soul will fall out while he sleeps. 

In the morning he goes shopping.

"Can't give you what you want," says the man behind the counter at Borgin & Burke's. He looks like Burke: Borgin is grimier, has fewer ideas about Fashion. Burke has a pocket square and looks as if he's been scrubbed recently. "Even if I had it, couldn't sell it to you. They're all regulated now, got to have a proper form." Sirius points to a wrapped bundle in the glass case behind him, tucked behind a paper sign. It hums a little, pleased to be noticed, and Burke's calm just barely flickers. 

"Got a form for that?"

"That's not-"

"Don't lie," Sirius says. "Don't stall. It's insulting. I cut my eyeteeth on dark objects."

"You're Orion's son," says Burke. "I remember Orion." Sirius pulls the drawstring purse out of his pocket and drops it on the table with a metallic clank. "I remember that, too," he says. He unlocks the lowest drawer of his desk and takes out a little glittering thing like a charm, loops of gold and an hourglass in the center. Sirius thinks that it looks light as air, but it's surprisingly heavy as Burke drops it into his palm. "Too many turns and-"

"And farewell to all my greatness," Sirius says. He rolls it in his palm. "Keep the change." It will be so many turns for just one second, just to have one second, one chance, back again. 

Terrible things happen to wizards who meddle with time.

 

 

 

Seventy-seven days is a long time for a time-turner, screamingly far past the recommended limits, but Sirius hangs gamely on through the vertigo and manages to throw up mostly in the dumpster behind Remus's block of flats, only partly on the wall. He lies in a pile of cardboard boxes for twenty minutes or so, willing the clanging in his ears to die down. It is Saturday now, he hopes: that Saturday when Remus walked out with the last kiss on record. When he can stand again Sirius crouches in the stairwell and charms his breath fresher and waits for Remus to walk out the door. At last- it feels like hours, ages- he does. Sirius counts a long five and heads after him, staying back twenty feet or so. Everything around him seems fake like a store display: people rushing past with packages, the faint sound of trains, cars idling past, all the things that happened before, like the repeated gestures of amusement-park automatons. Sirius has seen the films from Disneyland on Remus's muggle set. Someday they'll go there together and get fat on American milkshakes and fried chicken and pizza. His stomach lurches. Sirius ducks behind a shoe store to dry-heave briefly and when he comes back, Remus has disappeared from the street.

"Fuck." He jogs ahead, glancing down alleyways and into taxi windows. "Fuck, fuck fuck-" he snaps, until an arm shoots out from behind a newspaper stand and drags him backwards. It is Remus's arm. He drags Sirius behind a chain-link fence, away from the sidewalk, and Sirius's wand slips back down into his pocket. "Remus," he says, stupidly. He stares down at Remus's hand, knotted in the front of his coat, and back up at his flushed, thin face. He looks upset. Sirius feels like the ground has just dropped out, like he is losing his mind. This is so wonderful, and so terrible. He is never going to be able to explain this. At all.

"Are you following me?" asks Remus. Sirius tries to think of something clever to say and leans forward instead, pressing his disgusting minty mouth against Remus's clean one and kissing him hard. Remus lets him go, and makes a small confused sound in his throat.

"Yes," he says, when they break apart. "Don't go."

"Sirius-"

"Don't go," Sirius repeats, burying his face in the warm wool of Remus's shoulder, disappearing into the smell of overcoat and winter air and breakfast, today's long-ago breakfast that was waffles and tea. He smells their whole life together in that coat. This must be what going crazy is like. It's not altogether unpleasant. "Don't go like this, alone, all secrets." He straightens up and pulls himself together a little. Remus eyes him suspiciously. As if this was another one of his sudden whims, like the eight hours they spent being pirate assassins in the second year or the time he brought home a litter of beagles. "Tell me where you're going," he says. Remus is caving now, deflating. He is a sucker in the best possible way, Sirius has never been so glad of it. This is almost absolutely going to work. "Please do this for me."

"Sirius," he says, "it's only a few days." He shakes his head when Sirius starts to argue. "I can't tell you. I can't."

"I'll go for you."

"You _can't_ ," Remus says, fiercely. "Nobody can go but me. Nobody else, do you understand?" 

And suddenly, he does.

"They'll kill you." Sirius's mouth is dry, like crumbling toast. He can still taste vomit, faintly, and now panic. "They'll kill you and bury you in the woods and Dumbledore will lie about it and Lily will cry when she thinks I'm not looking, and you will be dead and I will never see you again," he babbles. 

"Oh, you have such confidence in me."

"Shut _up_ ," Sirius snaps. His mind flickers to the full-body bind, the _confundus_ , petrification. What would draw the least attention? Remus solves that question for him by being a hair quicker on the draw.

" _Stupefy_ ," he whispers, almost kindly, and Sirius sprawls back onto the ground, boneless and dead to the world, into a pile of old newspapers and rubbish. Like all of Remus's combat spells, it's too effective. Sirius dreams about seagulls for what is probably half an hour. When he wakes up, the sun is behind the clouds and Remus, just as before, is gone.

 

 

 

"I know it's the wolves," Sirius says. Subtlety was never chief among his virtues. Moody stares at him, surprised, and stops tapping the floo power out of his boot. After a horribly awkward silence, he looks back down and sighs. He gives the sole another thump and a thick cloud of dust flies out onto the floor. 

"Of course you do," he growls. "Poking your nose where it doesn't belong." He pulls the boot on, then points a grubby finger at Sirius. "You twat."

They're in a secure back room at the Wooden Shoe, Frank's cousin's husband's pub, on the outskirts of London. When Sirius sent the message he considered about a hundred different locations, all too close to the places he- himself, that is, the Sirius of _now_ that ought to be the one messaging people- might be found. He doesn't know what happens when you meet yourself. It's probably tragic. Nor does he want to imagine what could go wrong when your friends realize that there are two of you, one seventy-odd days older and constantly wearing the same set of trousers. Sirius folds his arms over his chest, trying to look and feel determined and authoritative. It's difficult; he's been sleeping in alleyways for three nights, and he is not exactly at his best. Moody retracts the finger he's been pointing into Sirius's face, and gets up. He towers overhead and they stand and scowl at each other. "Well?" asks Moody. "Did you bring me here just to say that? Because I've got plenty-"

Sirius punches him in the mouth. Hard. It barely knocks Moody off-balance, and in an instant he's swung back and his wand is drawn, point jabbed into Sirius's throat and his free hand pulling him off the ground by his own lapels. It's like being in training all over again. "You little _prick_ ," he hollers. "What the-"

"You sent him alone."

"What?"

"All _alone_ ," Sirius shouts, and pulls Moody's arm off his own jacket front. He stumbles backwards. "They could take one look at him and decide to rip his throat out and we'd know _fuckall_ about it!" Moody stares at him dumbly like a startled ox, and it only makes Sirius angrier. "People whisper behind his back. He doesn't get sensitive missions. But you can drop him in the middle of nowhere with the ferals, one big happy family?" Moody doesn't answer. "The hell with you," says Sirius. 

"Now, come on," Moody says, clearing his throat. He looks unsettled. "I don't- Remus is a good sort. It wasn't my idea."

"They were your orders."

"He came to me," Moody frowns. "He knows better than anyone how much we need it."

Oh, Sirius thinks. Remus.

"I need to know where." 

"Too dangerous."

"Moody," he says, "the most dangerous thing right now is me, if I don't get answers."

"Is that a threat?" Moody glares down at him, amused, the mountain belittling the molehill. "I taught you all the combat spells you know, boy." He makes a move to push Sirius aside and Sirius ducks around him, plants his foot in Moody's rear and kicks him forwards into a chair. Moody swears and casts, but Sirius is quicker, already throwing up a _repulso_ whose recoil knocks Moody through the rest of the furniture. Moody rolls through the pieces of an armchair and makes it to his knees, cursing back; the spell hits the wall and the bricks crack on impact. Moody's not playing. The room's warded for protection and for silence, but it won't hold- Sirius casts another shield and thinks as fast as he can. There's really only one advantage he has. When Moody staggers to his feet, Sirius jumps, shedding his human form in midair. There's a shift and the dog lands on Moody's chest, claws digging in through layers of coat and shirt, back legs scrambling up for purchase. "Seven _hells_ -" Moody has time to gasp, before Padfoot's teeth wrench the wand out of his hand and snap it into brittle pieces. Moody's empty hands flail and grab at Padfoot's coat, but the dog twists away and ducks beneath the table. A second later, Sirius stands up with his own wand in hand. Moody puts his palms up, eyes wide. "Christ," he yells. "When did that happen?" 

"Er," says Sirius. "Third year." 

"You're unregistered. Does Albus know?"

"We've played fetch."

"Well, that's something." He stares Sirius down. "Is your tantrum over? Because my wand-"

" _Obliviate_ ," Sirius whispers, and Moody drops. Sirius breathes slowly through his mouth for a full minute before he has the presence of mind to lower his wand. He is so fucked for this.

Well, in for a penny.

Moody's too cautious to leave the map in the open, or to trust it to paper. Sirius unbuttons the older man's cuffs and rolls his sleeves up, checking the pale, scarred skin of his forearms for traces of lines. They're milk-blue like veins, fading up to the wrist. Faint as breath. Almost unreadable. Sirius leans close and whispers to the skin, _aparecium_ , a call to hidden things. The lines are drawn out, coloring on the surface. He can make out a village set between two forests, a contact location and a safe house, a series of paths winding between the human habitations and the deep woods. A couple of code words. He presses his arm to Moody's and ties their wrists loosely with rope, taps the lines with the tip of his wand and feels the map slither into his own flesh. It burns and sinks deep, disappearing as it settles. He pulls his sleeves down when it stops stinging.

It takes a bit of effort to wrestle Moody's body into an armchair, but Sirius does it, straining and huffing. He leaves him propped up with his feet on the table, half-empty bottles scattered around and tipped onto the floor. The broken wand, Sirius pockets. He lays a light _confundus_ around the door, one that Moody can't help but walk into, and drops one on the bartender as he leaves by a back door. It's pretty sloppy work as covers go, but simple is better, and it'll hold for now. Sirius is fairly certain it won't be the first time Moody has woken up bleary-eyed and irritable in a puddle of firewhiskey.

The time-turner is still thumping against his chest as he jogs away, dangling from its chain and itching the way powerful things do. He makes it to the train station and apparates from a bathroom stall. He'll walk until he finds a barn, someplace a stray dog can spend the night without getting noticed. Beyond that there are miles and miles of freezing countryside to cross, places warded and remote, where it's best not to leave the trace of power. Sirius tucks his trouser legs into his boots and walks.

It's raining when he reaches the woods.

 

 

.


	2. Chapter 2

Sirius sits protected and warm under a pine tree, picking a last cigarette from a crumpled pack in his pocket, watching fat drops of water roll off of his _impervius_ and listening to the rushing sound of rain. It's nearly dawn, the long blue hours that stretch the old day thinner and thinner until the sun melts it into nothingness, and starts it all again. He's been sleeping in sheds for a few nights now, relying on heating charms and pilfered tins of beans; he was only a half-mile out from the map's circled location when the storm hit. It's turned the sky white and mottled gray like the underside of a sheep's coat, hanging damp and heavy over the countryside. 

When they were younger they spent afternoons like this curled up on the sofas in the common room, tossing charmed paper in the fire and watching it change colors. Remus's were always interesting, bright shows of sparks and flares that curled like birds' wings. James's were vulgar explosions and Peter's usually went wrong and filled the corridors with sulfuric fumes. They'd sit too close to the fire and bake their feet while their backs froze and their eyes grew dry and watery. He tries to remember what that felt like, the warmth and the crackle of the fire, staring down at the tip of his cigarette. It burns slow and steadily. Sirius smokes and leans against the tree and waits for the rain to stop.

When it finally does, it's late morning. He stretches out the kinks, stands up and brushes needles out of his coat. He'll go into the village and take a look around, get a room, try to find Remus. He'll shake the town upside-down from its ankles if he has to. He doesn't know what he'll do if they're already marked him as Order. If things have gone wrong. He's heading down the hill, lost in thought, considering a glamour, maybe a false beard to go with his growing stubble. A figure comes into view. It's a man walking alone on the path, head down, in a shabby old military coat and a scarf and a pair of ripped jeans. Sirius stops and watches him come closer. His hands tremble in his pockets. He feels, in this second, like everything's going to be fine. He always was a bit lucky.

"Hello," he calls out, and Remus stares up at him from the path.

 

 

 

They don't speak on their way through the village. More to the point, Remus doesn't speak, and Sirius gives up after a couple of abortive attempts at conversation. They walk in stiff silence, Remus leading the way. Sirius's glamour itches on his face: a heavy beard and unruly eyebrows, a rash and wrinkles, gnarled hands. He looks like a fifty-year-old half-troll. Remus did it, in the woods, and Sirius wonders if it isn't the intensity of his anger that is making the spell crawl around on his skin like a rash. They walk to an inn on the edge of the settlement, and Remus nods to a couple of hairy, aggressive-looking guys sitting and smoking on the fence rails. They nod back, watching Sirius as he passes. They go inside, upstairs, into a plain room with a little bedroom to the side, and Remus shuts the door and locks it behind them. Sirius can smell the electric tinge of wards in this room, Remus's trademark designs. Sirius sits heavily into an uncomfortable chair and scrubs the glamour off with his wand. His face feels raw.

"Why?" Remus asks. There's no real answer to that. He can't admit to what he's done. Remus would go crazy trying to figure out the consequences. "You don't trust me?"

"What? No." Christ, not that. "Of course not."

"They don't trust me?"

"I said, it isn't like that. I was worried about you, is that so unbelievable? Home on Thursday," he parrots. Sirius's face knits up, angrily. "Speaking of trust."

"It's different."

"It's different because it's you," Sirius snaps. "How do you think it feels? I had to go to Moody to find out which _country_ you were in."

"Moody?" Remus looks surprised. "He told you?"

"Not as such, no." Sirius's arm itches. "Doesn't matter. Tell me what's happening."

"Nothing to tell." Remus crosses the room and sits down on the bed opposite. His hands splay out on the cheap, scratchy-looking blankets. "For the moment I'm just trying to win their trust. See if I can't change a few minds. Or at least get them to meet." He looks up. "We need them," he says. "They need us. If they side with him, it's-" he stops. Inhales it back down. "You know what could happen to them. To all of us, if it got out. This is something I have to do myself," he says. "You have to go home."

"No."

"Sirius."

"I'm not going anywhere." He gets up and sits beside Remus, cross-legged and severe. "If you knock me out again, you prick, I'll still find you." 

Remus stares at him. 

"Why are you here?" He can't possibly be this dense. Sirius has practically tattooed it on his forehead. Remus is supposed to be the clever one. "Really." Sirius leans forward and kisses him; tugs him closer by the back of his neck, parts his lips and sinks into it. It's the best explanation he's got. Remus smells like grass and dirt, wonderful things, warm wool and the faintest hint of fresh water, creekbeds, streams. He tastes like bitter tea.

"Idiot," Sirius says.

They lean back together and it's been so long, too long, days for Remus but weeks of waiting and panic and loneliness for him. It's intense and lovely and over too soon, and then Remus is curled around him, half-awake. Sirius stares up at the ceiling, at the knots and lines in the boards, and feels Remus's heart thudding slowly against his side. He thinks about that book Remus used to read, the one about universes. Worlds and chances and changes. Somewhere, right at this minute, he's also back in the city, getting sad-drunk with James, wondering where the hell Remus is, and why isn't he home yet. Another life. Or at least it feels that way. Remus snores faintly against his ribs, now totally gone. 

Sirius closes his eyes and dreams about clocks: hour hands and minute hands, slowly spinning. Gears grinding to a halt.

 

 

 

Remus says he can stay.

"As long as you don't get into trouble. Don't talk to anyone. But don't act too stand-offish. It'll seem suspicious. Don't go into the south woods. But don't seem like you're avoiding it on purpose. Don't tell anyone your real name. But don't give them one of your stupid rock-band names. Nobody's going to believe you're Charlie Watts."

"Duffy Power?"

"Please, Sirius," Remus grumbles, burying his face back in the blanket. "Go home."

Sirius spends the first day or so working on duplicating the hideous glamour Remus put on him when they first came through the village. Remus was always better with charms work, easier and lighter and quicker. It takes Sirius an hour and a half to get the eyebrows right. "Facial hair, really?" Remus asks him, amused, perched backwards on a chair. "This is what stumps you. You dyed three people entirely green with actual scales when we were in school." Sirius finally gets the eyebrows to work after that, except on Remus instead of himself, and there is a brief outbreak of violence. One of them breaks the chair. 

"Prat," says Sirius. He sucks out a splinter. 

Pretty soon Remus is gone almost every evening, to the tavern down the row. Sirius follows him sometimes and spends the night perched at the bar, not really listening in, just watching the firelight and the scraggly bunch sitting around it. He doesn't know what they talk about. Remus says it's mostly chatter, local gossip, once in a while something about the war. But the ones who come indoors to talk are the ones halfway convinced- it's the others that need drawing out. There's a second settlement, not quite a human one, in the south woods. Remus goes there twice, only during the day. When he's gone, Sirius paces the edge of the tree line as Padfoot, catching a hundred comfortable scents that say _rabbitfieldmousebadger_ and a dozen more that shriek _dangernoblood_. 

They seem to like Remus, the shabby people he spends all his time with. Sirius watches them nurse their pints and nod while he talks. It helps that there are pale pink scars peeping out from under his collar and his cuffs; the patches in his trousers seem to help even more. Remus has told them that he is an aspiring writer, submitting manuscripts via owl thanks to his 'condition.' Sirius is impressed that Remus came up with that cover on his own. He is less impressed when Remus informs him that Sirius's cover is being a squibby hobo drifter whose life story Remus is trying to sell as a cautionary novella. 

He has never really thought about them, the rest of them- wolves- where they live, what they do with their time, how they eat and where they sleep. He knows they're not all like Remus, with a good degree and a part-time job and night classes and lots of wizard friends. Remus has explained about the registry, the marks they're all supposed to have, the ones Dumbledore kept Remus from getting. Sirius has always thought Remus was special, Remus with the oak-leaf eyes and the good handwriting, his Moony. But he never imagined how different it could have been; how close it was. How very close. It fills him with a rage and a fright he can barely articulate. Sirius starts taking long walks when Remus is meeting with the others, or writing out his reports and disguising them as trashy literature. Sometimes Sirius spends long afternoons down at the pub, drinking one pint after another and talking quidditch with a bunch of opinionated elderly farmers. He misses the hell out of Prongs, out of his full pantry and that comfy sofa with the patched back, but this isn't bad. He's coming to enjoy the atmosphere.

"Men," says the girl pouring drinks. She keeps biting her bottom lip with worry, and she's not stingy with the whiskey. Sirius likes her. She thinks he is a harmless ugly old man with acute dermatitis and a ginger beard. She's having love troubles. "Only one thing on your mind." 

"We're animals," Sirius says, and she slides the bottle across the bar. It's starting to be the best vacation ever.

He is still sitting on the corner stool, rapidly losing track of his feet and balance and the time of day, when the door swings open and a burst of cold wind slinks up the back of his coat. Sirius turns his collar up and stares down into his drink, thinking about the freezing walk ahead of him. It's already dark. Remus is probably reading a book right now, or charming a report, warm under a blanket. Maybe Sirius can persuade him to forget about going to the woods tonight, convince him to stay in bed and sleep naked next to him. They can have good crunchy rabbit dreams, chasing and coursing, and Remus can make that funny twitch in his sleep. There are haunts in his unconscious which Sirius is sure are shared: long moonrises, dark dens in the hollow. In his dreams he's always running against a partner who could outrace him if they tried. 

Someone taps him on the shoulder.

"Mate," says a disturbingly familiar voice. Sirius freezes. "I asked if you'd seen this man." A napkin with a pen drawing on it is held up in his face. It's crudely done, but effective. There in poor imitation is the gentle curve of Remus's jaw, the large soft eyes, the thin and serious mouth. The scar across the bridge of his nose, the hair falling into his eyes. All suggested sketchily by a nervous hand. Sirius didn't actually know- until right this second- that he had any talent for drawing. "Tall and thin. Wearing a shabby jacket." Well, that's true, but uncalled for.

"Haven't seen him," Sirius says. The napkin is lowered by a black-haired man in a long leather coat and a fat wooly scarf that Sirius knows was knit by hand. By Molly Prewitt. Well, Weasley now. Sirius looks at himself very, very carefully. There are a hundred ways that everything could suddenly go wrong. Sirius- the Sirius of now- has got wind-chapped cheeks and dirty hair, and his face looks thin. Did he really forget to eat that often while Remus was gone? He should have remembered this pub, the broken sign over the door and the moth-eaten sofa in front of the fire, the way the door never quite shut properly. But back then it was one of a dozen pubs, another dusty shack filled with grumpy, unhelpful old sots; one more hit on his cross-country quest to find what went missing. It never meant anything until now. "You deaf?" Sirius asks himself, hoping his voice hasn't gone up an octave with fright. "Said I hadn't seen 'im." He is now absurdly grateful to Remus for the awful glamour and the warty chin. He knows he is a million times too vain to think for a second that they bear any resemblance to one another. True to form, Sirius- the other Sirius- huffs away, insulted, and tries the picture on somebody else. Christ, what an asshole he was. Is. What an obvious, dangerous asshole. The other Sirius gets another stiff shake of the head and is then firmly ignored. Thank the fates for insular rural ways.

When Sirius's visiting self leaves in disgust, Sirius finishes his drink and drops too much change on the table and follows him, trying to stay calm and walk slowly. It's not too difficult, considering he's tipsy. He staggers after himself in the dark until they get to the edge of the village. Sirius sits down awkwardly in a bush; purely to avoid being seen, of course. There's a sharp pop and when he looks up again, he's gone.

He remembers, now. 

He remembers that before tonight he'd felt close, really close, and that this latest failure had stung worse than all the rest. He'd looked up at the night sky here- right here- standing on this very path. He'd stared up at the stars and felt, for the first time, that Remus might really be dead. Sirius sits in the hedge until he can stand again, and then he goes back to Remus, who lets him drag him to bed and pull the covers over both their heads. He very much does not stare at the knots in the ceiling long after Remus falls asleep. 

He very much does not dream.

 

 

 

"You can't come with me."

"I've run with you before." Sirius shrugs. "How different could it be?" He's only looking down at the book in his hands, and so he doesn't notice when suddenly Remus is looming beside him, with his hands on the back of the chair. Sirius looks up and blinks. Remus's eyes are nearly all pupil now, blown out and dark and dangerous, with just a rim of light to keep him from tipping over. Ironic, that: the moon in his eyes. There are five hours left. They'll pass slowly.

"There are eleven out there now," he says. "More soon." His voice is low and raw. Scraping for human vowels. Sirius doesn't know what changes first, inside: the mind or the body, the heart or the lungs or the fingernails or the follicles. It happens so fast. It's the prelude that's such agony. "It's a real pack. Not a bunch of transfigured wizards masquerading as rats and stags. There are no deer in the south woods, did you know that? None for fifty miles." He smiles and leans closer. "Because deer can't go to ground, can't find a den and huddle there under the bank, hoping none of us feel like digging. They have to run instead. They'd run until they dropped, until their hearts burst and the blood rushed out, and then we'd be on them." He presses his mouth against Sirius's earlobe, almost at his pulse, the briefest of kisses. "I don't want you in the woods tonight."

"Well, Christ." says Sirius. "When you put it that way." Remus laughs and then he leaves, and Sirius tries to concentrate on his book. He stares at a page for fifteen minutes and then turns a few rapidly, hoping it will jump-start something. It doesn't. He lies face-down on the blankets and recites the starting lineup of the Holyhead Harpies. He tries to remember how to say "I would like a pizza" in every language he knows. It's a dismal failure. He gets as far as _I_. There's an obvious solution, but it will require putting his boots on. 

It's raining cats and dogs again.

"Hiya," says that funny barmaid, when he sits down at his usual stool, wringing out his rain slicker. "Didn't think I'd see you tonight." He raises an eyebrow. "Don't mean anything by it, just-" her voice drops. "Full moon. And-" there's a brief crash of thunder, perilously close over their heads. "The storm."

"But here I am," he says.

Glasses are perfectly round and hollow and concave at the bottom; little wells, reflecting pools. He can hold it in his hand and turn it, watch it sparkle. She pours him a whiskey and then another. He staggers home through the puddles, startling at every snap of the twig and every flicker of far-off lightning, and locks the door twice before he falls asleep, face-down in his clothes on the bed. He only has one dream that night, as the heavens hammer and flash above him. One long fitful dream that is just him and his immediate family in a fancy parlor with the gas-lights and candles burning smokey and orange for hours and hours. It is his funeral. Regulus is alive, but only six years old. There is a body in a square, squat coffin at the other end of the room; Sirius dreams that he walks up to it and stares inside. He is dead at the bottom, frozen in time at age thirteen, the first time he said _I hate you_ to somebody and really meant it.

"Don't worry," his mother tells him, in the dream. "You were terrible." And then everybody dances a mazurka. 

When he wakes up in the early morning- not yet a quarter to five- he smells smoke in the air still. It takes him a minute, several minutes, to realize there are no gas lamps burning, no candles. No fire in the grate. He sticks his head out the window and smells the woodsmoke, feels a thin wisp of ash float in the air and touch his face like a snowflake. Someone screams from the bottom of the path, down the hill, and several someones start yelling back and forth on the floors below his, the other boarders and the cook. He pulls a jacket on and shoves his wand in his pocket and goes downstairs with his glamour mostly worn off. He has totally forgotten the eyebrows.

"What's burning?" he asks. 

"The south woods," they say.

He's running before he knows his feet have moved.

 

 

 

The south woods are a battleground: clumps of earth and shattered tree-trunks, bodies sprawled in the mud. Smoke is still billowing from the fresh fires around the perimeter: someone set the ring in stages, driving them further and further to the center. A trap for the wolves. It could have only been an hour ago, an hour of two, he doesn't know. He doesn't know. He doesn't know if it happened when they were still- or when they were human, naked, dazed from the switch. He doesn't know. The bodies are scorched and scarred, human, with dirty fingernails and bloody hair and shocked, brutalized faces. They're not even cold yet. Sirius keeps kneeling next to them with trembling hands and turning them over, and not finding Remus. Hot tears are welled up in his eyes, and his throat is raw. He stumbles over tree branches that he didn't see in the haze. 

"Remus," he calls. " _Remus!_ " They could still be here, close by, waiting to pick off survivors. But he doesn't care who hears him, as long as Remus does, as long as he can find him and put his jacket around him and feel his heartbeat and get him far away from here. He will be here, somewhere, lightly stunned or hiding among the rocks. There will be a scratch on his forehead or a cut on his arm, and Sirius will wrap it up, help him, carry him. They'll run and they won't stop and-

-everything goes cold. Everything stops. Sirius stands there trembling in the frost, the early morning air cold and wet against his back like a bank of snow, trickling down his spine. He stands for a long time, looking out across the broken trees and down through the clearing, where there are two bodies close together. He stands and stands and then he goes closer, one foot at a time. Like his legs won't work, like he's been petrified and the curse is pushing itself slowly through his body, freezing him inside, locking his joints, hardening his blood inside his veins. He kneels down and touches one of them on the shoulder. It's a woman. A woman with long hair, dark matted hair full of leaves, and a gaping, bloody wound in the middle of her back. There is a man beside her- long and pale- with his arm stretched out, as if to shield her. He is splattered with her blood, and his own. Sirius kneels beside the body, and tries to believe that the scars are not familiar. They curl along the shoulder blades- the places he could reach, while he was changing- and disappear around his waist, his elbows. They are scars any werewolf could have. Any one of them. Not just him. But they are so familiar. Sirius has often thought about the first time they saw each other, on a train platform, one of them with half a dozen monogrammed suitcases piled up on a trolley pushed by elves, and the other with one battered suitcase carried in hand. He has thought about the way they ended up sharing a carriage by sheer luck, when nobody would sit with either of them for opposite reasons, when they tried to show off to each other with their best charms work and both were rotten. Every time Sirius thinks about it, it feels less like coincidence, and more like the universe rotating slowly with inscrutable intent. Things that happen, and happen again and again, for a reason. 

Like tides, like spring: an act of God. 

Sirius turns the body over. And then it is no longer a body, not only a body at all but Remus, Remus's planes and angles, the memorized skin and sturdy bones and narrow flesh and long, proud nose and the lips that he has kissed a hundred times, a thousand; the mouth that has shouted at him and murmured away nightmares, the fingertips that met him halfway and knew him, felt him, made him real and right. All the color's gone out of Remus's face. His eyes are still open, and shocked. It hurt, he knows. It must have. Sirius curls his head into Remus's neck and pulls the limp arms around him and inhales the smell of earth and sweat and blood. He's not entirely cold, not quite: there is still phantom warmth in the center of his chest, where Sirius presses his cheek. Faint. Fading. Suddenly Sirius can't breathe. He shakes all over and tries to turn into the dog- it will be better, better for a second or a minute to be a dog, to be an animal that can't understand, so he tries, he shuts his eyes and thinks it, _padfootpadfootpadfoot_ , wills it so- but he can't. He can't focus, he can't change, he is trapped like this, in his man's body, and he is crying now, hysterically, silently at first and then in cracking, sucking sobs that rock him back and forth. He is screaming.

"Me," he gasps. He doesn't know why. "Me for him," he says. No more spells, no charms, just- this. He thinks he finally understands. This is how it begins. This is the deeper well where magic originates. It is dark and bottomless. It could work if he's good enough, if he's willing. Magic listens. He will sell anything it asks for. He's so willing. He cradles Remus's head in his hands, presses their foreheads together. "Me," he says. It's barely a sound. "Remus," he says. He waits and wills it. The world starts to wash away, until he is deaf and hoarse and reeling. But nothing happens. No life stirring under his hands, no fluttering of eyelashes, breath. No trade. No miracle. Nothing happens at all.

Nothing but Sirius lying across him, crying like a baby. 

 

 

.


	3. Chapter 3

He doesn't know how long he lies there. But he is still lying there when the villagers finally arrive, fearful, waving shovels and brooms and crossing themselves, picking their way through the debris. They take one look at him- hysterical, covered in blood and dirt- and scatter, screaming. Off to their cottages. To get their guns, their nets. To start a hunt.

That's what does it, finally, what gets him up and moving, joints pulling apart like cracking ice, body dull and head spinning. Sirius only has the presence of mind to heave Remus over his shoulders and apparate about twenty miles away. They land in the middle of an abandoned field. Nowhere. Tall trees and an abandoned farmhouse on the ridge above, toppling over gradually, continually, like rain. Sirius sits and stares up at it and then he digs a hole big enough for both of them. With his hands, his paws: he can be the dog again and so he is, for hours. When he's done digging he lies in the hole next to Remus, curled against him, panting flat and shallow, the smell of death in his nostrils, making his lips curl over his incisors. He watches the sun cross the sky, lower itself into the treetops, melt down and away. Later, as a man, he covers the hole over. With a knife, he slits the tip of his fingers and wards the grave. He doesn't play around with dissembling charms, the wander-away, prank frights for muggle cemeteries. Sirius draws the sigil, presses his bloody fingertips to his lips. _Sepeliamus perpetuum_. He remembers the curse from his grandfather's funeral, his own father's stained hands. Anyone who disturbs this grave will be forced to share it, for all eternity. It's the kind of thing he's promised never to do. The sort of power he's promised never to touch. It doesn't seem so important, now. Lot of that going around.

Sirius puts a hand over his heart, and the time-turner knocks against his chest, cold and solid and heavy. It shocks him. He'd forgotten he was wearing it, always wearing it- couldn't leave it on a table or in a drawer with Remus, with Remus around- couldn't have him seeing it, him finding out. And now here he is, in this field, alone with his second chance. He could go back to this morning, early- but then he might be too late again, or too early. He could get ripped to shreds by a pack of wolves, or caught in the fight. He doesn't know how many there were- he could die right there beside him, or out in the forest, in the fire. They could die together, but that's not good enough. Nothing's good enough, if it doesn't save Remus. He's got to think smarter, better. More like Remus would. He could warn him early. The day before. Two days before. But it didn't happen, did it? Nobody came and warned them, no stranger in a bad glamour with dire tidings. Not even a note. Wouldn't he have- if he'd done it, would he remember? No, probably not. "Fuck," Sirius says, out loud. He scrubs at his face, his closed eyes, with his dirty hands. He doesn't know what the fuck he means. Isn't it all supposed to fit? He tries to think if there was a moment when they were apart, when Remus was alone. A moment he could warn him, pull him away, just fix this. Something opportune, something possible. Or something big and stupid. The Prongs approach. He could glamour himself again, differently, and just barge into the upstairs room and tell it plain and then run away. He could send a hundred owls. Bigger. He could burn the village down a week early. Send everybody scattering, send Remus home, back to London. No. It needs to be massive, unstoppable, perfect. Bigger. Not enough. Not safe enough. 

He begins to have an idea. A terrible, huge idea. Seventy-four turns last time. How far can it go?

Sirius walks until he finds a stream. It's barely more than a trickle of icy water, stumbling its way around rocks it used to move when it was stronger. He sympathizes. He drinks and then washes his face and hands, untangles his hair. The water's clear and tastes sweet. There's not much he can do for the dried blood and muck on his clothes, beyond a couple of scourgifies. He'll be presentable enough: more like that squibby hobo drifter than a psychotic murderer on the loose. He kneels down in a clearing. He'll be sick again afterwards, no doubt. Probably worse than last time. Not a bad idea to be out here, in the quiet woods, when he does it. It might take hours for him to be able to apparate. He takes a few deep breaths. It's going to be worth it. It's going to be alright. This is a Plan. A real plan. He starts it spinning. It takes a second, to really get it going, turning and turning- and then it's whirring away, clicking and humming and buzzing under his fingers, twisting faster, faster and faster. He's over one hundred before he loses count. Sirius panics and grabs the tiny hourglass, squeezes it hard, and the world grinds to a halt- the air is too dense to breathe, his limbs too heavy. He panics and flails out and crashes to the ground, face-down in grass and leaves, struggling for air. He lies there, tears streaming down his cheeks, veins popping, hands clutching convulsively, until it passes. Until the sucking whirlwind of time catches up. After a minute, he can hear bird song again; then, the faint trickle of the stream. He sucks in a breath, and faints dead away.

When he wakes up, it's sunset. Sunset on what day, he doesn't know. When he finally stands up, he spews all over his boots.

"Fuck," says Sirius, again.

 

 

 

He almost apparates home, straight home to his own flat, his own clean comfortable flat with its balconet and pantry full of crackers, because his head is pounding and all he wants is a shower and a shave and a clean pair of trousers. But of course that would be the stupidest goddamn thing in the universe. _Hello_ , he'd have to say to himself. He could do a little bow. Take his hat off. _How do you do? I'm you._ Instead he goes to the south end of London, glamours himself a head of dishwater blonde hair and a weedy mustache, and lightly compels a bartender into handing over the keys to an upstairs room at the Pig's Tail. Sirius takes a hot bath, drinks a beer and eats a shepherd's pie he barely tastes. Sirius sleeps for twelve hours straight. The morning's newspaper says it is August twenty-seventh, and that the week's weather will be hot and fine.

It was, he remembers. It was. Suddenly he knows where they will be, tomorrow. A beach picnic, just the three of them: Prongs and Peter and himself. Remus was working, at one of his awful restaurant jobs, taking abuse from drunk patrons for penny tips. Lily was at her mother's having dinner, fighting with her sister and her sister's fat boring boyfriend again. Inconsequential stuff, then. Normal. At the time it'd been so precious, that normalcy, before things got too serious, too dark. The war was slow, that summer. But this is what he needs. This is the opportunity. Sirius tries to remember everything, what he brought, what he wore, what he said that morning, today, the moments when he went off to have a slash or smoke one of the cigarettes he promised he was quitting.

He rides the train downtown, to the muggle shops that are his favorites, the places where he can buy plastic hula dancers and cheap sunglasses and telephones with curling cords, all the shit he used to bring over to Remus's and ask him to explain. Sirius wanders through them, in the door and out again, for a long time before he settles down and makes himself focus. He buys a pair of scissors and then a pair of swim trunks and a linen shirt and sandals and a woven hamper, the same things he knows are sitting in his flat right now, strewn around the sofa, waiting for tomorrow. He finds the exact ones, the right pattern, the right size. He puts them on in the changing room at the department store, and looks at himself in the mirror for a long time. It looks like a costume. There are dark circles under his eyes, and his hair is too long. He is months older than he was: it shouldn't make such a difference but it does. It has. He packs the rest of his ruined clothes into the hamper, and walks out. He takes the train to the seashore that afternoon, and walks all the way across town by the beach road. It's hot still but the sea air is cooler, and the wind whips along the tideline and up his shirt, through his hair, into his mouth and down his throat. Sand grit stings his eyes and scrubs his skin. It feels clean. Good. He can smell the salt, overwhelmingly. There are a few families still packing up, a couple of lovers trying to disappear in the dunes. Their silhouettes merge together, disappear into the dark. Gulls swing lower, and then wheel away. The sun is sinking in the distance; just a flame of orange and a line of trembling red, the last glow giving way under a blue blanket of night. He cuts his hair above the shoulders and combs it out, then lies down in the dunes behind the changing-house with his old coat as a pillow. The grasses rattle and shake and whisper around him. In a little while the stars come out. One by one at first, and then in sprays and starts, whole constellations bursting into view, shining galaxies beyond them, out in the black. They arc slowly, dazzlingly crisp and pure. They don't feel very far away. Even if they are. Science is for muggles, really, even though the moon landing still thrills him. He understands stars on faith. He holds his hands up to frame them, to touch them with the tips of his shaking fingers. He knows their names, almost the whole sky. When he was young- very young- nearly everyone he knew was named for stars. He learned them by heart to love them better. That was a kind of magic, too. To never be alone.

He hates almost all of them now, and knows he is hated. But he's still glad to see their namesakes turning above him. Stars don't remember. Or else they forgive. Cold and bright as they are. He doesn't even notice when he turns into the dog; he is already half-asleep. He curls tighter into a ball, tail over his nose, and dreams of the woods outside Hogwarts, birds and squirrels and rabbits and dens under the roots.

They are good dreams.

 

 

 

"You're shite, Pads," James hollers. "Utter shite!" 

Sirius has just watched himself trip in the sand, miss the quaffle entirely, and go face-down into the foamy water curling up the beach. He watches himself struggle now, spewing saltwater and curses, and tackle James Potter around the waist. The quaffle floats very serenely to the ground, and Peter continues eating his lemon ice. Sirius- _the real Sirius_ , he thinks cruelly inside his own head- is hiding in the shadow of a broken-off edge of the boardwalk, with a folded-up newspaper nearby in case anyone gets close enough to ask what he is doing. He is watching for the moment when he- other he- took a walk to charm a cigarette off a hot dog girl and buy a souvenir for Moony. He thinks that word and nausea hits, a wave quick and sharp in the pit of his stomach. He puts his face in between hot, sandy hands and breathes in grit. There is no grave. Not yet. It hasn't happened. It can't. That grave is in a world they will never open again, a place that will never exist. He makes himself keep watching. It's nearly two in the afternoon. He doesn't remember this pickup game lasting so fucking long.

"Catch this," now-Sirius says, finally, rubbing James's face thoughtfully in the quaffle. He lets go and stands up and dusts off his hands and face. "I'm off."

"Where to?"

"Got to see a man about a dog," he lies, and lopes up the bank. James and Peter squabble half-heartedly about following him or not following him. As Sirius watches, they begin to build a rather terrible sandcastle.

"Don't see why," Peter says. "Sirius will just crush it when he gets back." In fairness, Sirius remembers doing just that. 

He leaves them there. He follows himself to the boardwalk, leaving enough distance between them so as not to seem like an odd pair of twins on a constitutional. He is also wearing his dirty jacket over his beach clothes, and still holding the newspaper awkwardly at his side. His wand's tucked inside it. Now-Sirius stops at the hot dog stand, gets his cigarette and puts it behind his ear. Then he heads off towards the souvenir shops, but in between the hot dogs and the souvenirs, there's a men's room. Sirius pulls his wand out from the newspaper, carefully, and closes the distance between them. When he's about a foot away, he puts his wand up to the back of his own spine and whispers, _imperio_.

He could go to Azkaban for this, if they ever caught him. He doesn't care. He doesn't feel anything at all as the curse leaves his mouth, as it passes through the body in front of him and wrings the will out of it.

"Walk into the loo," he says. "Go stand inside a stall, but don't lock the door." Without turning around, now-Sirius docilely turns left and passes through the entrance, out of sight. Sirius stands a moment and pretends to fold up his newspaper, then follows him in. There's nobody inside, but he shuts the door and locks it with a spell anyway. He finds himself- literally- standing in the last stall in the row. They stare at each other for a long minute. Now-Sirius regards him dully with cow eyes, obedient and stuffed to the gills with magic. Sirius looks at his own face: sharp cheekbones, ragged hair falling into his eyes, a bit of stubble starting to come in patches. A careless boy become a careless man, cultivated just this way, casually anti-posh but posh in the bones anyway, attitudes lovingly tended and privileges expected and received. He is struck dumb with hate. And with fear, and sympathy. He wants to shake himself, and he wants to disappear. He reaches out and touches his own cheek, and the body in front of him doesn't resist, doesn't flinch, doesn't do a damn thing. There's more flesh over those bones than on his, now. He will have to glamour himself. He'll have to wear a mask of his own face. He makes quick work of it, and then tells himself to wait inside the men's room with the stall door locked. "Count to five thousand," he says. "Then go back. Nothing is wrong. You understand? You should act as if nothing is wrong. Nothing happened. You don't remember meeting me. You got your cigarette, and you took a walk, and you got bored."

"I got bored."

"And you came back."

"Okay," says now-Sirius. "One. Two, three."

"No cheating."

"No cheating," now-Sirius repeats, earnestly. "I promise."

Sirius checks himself in the mirror, then wads his jacket and newspaper up and leaves them both in a trash can by the door. He goes back out into the sun, meanders down the boardwalk, tries to remember what it felt like, this light on his skin, this spring in his step. It's very much like walking into a lucid dream. By the time he gets back to James and Peter, he's actually smiling.

"Here's trouble," says James. "You get your cigarette?" And here he thought he'd been so clever back then, so suave. Fucking obvious git.

"Up yours," he says, and forces himself to grin. He sits down in the sand and watches them struggle with their terrible sandcastle. They're trying for Hogwarts, he can see that now. There's a pointed lump that's supposed to be a tower, and a little forecourt and a lopsided bridge with two scooped-out ravines on either side. He sits in silence, fiddles with a couple of shells, digs out a tench and fills it. After a minute, he sees Peter watching him. Peter nudges James, who throws sand at his face in kneejerk retaliation. But then Peter points in Sirius's direction, exasperated, and James stops wrecking his own half of the castle. Sirius tries very hard not to notice the pointed looks that pass between them. There is an awkward silence in their corner of the beach, except for the shrieking of the gulls.

"So," says James. It sounds as if his gut's being squeezed slightly. James's two weaknesses: emotions, and talking about them. "Everything... alright?"

"Fine," says Sirius. 

"Good," says James. Peter elbows him. "Are you _sure_?"

"I don't want to talk about it," Sirius says, looking away towards the surf. It's both a truth and a lie. He's relying on them to press harder.

"Is it something about Remus?" Peter asks, suddenly, and Sirius can't help himself- he's sure his face clouds, his hands clench. He tries to get hold of himself, but Peter's already seen. "It is, isn't it," Peter says. James looks surprised.

"What about Remus?" He gapes like a fish. "What's going on?"

"Nothing," says Sirius, hollowly. And then, as if it's being torn from him: "It's just- it's just, he's never where he says he is, these days. He's always out someplace, I don't know." James and Peter stare at him. "What is that?" he continues. It's coming out in a rush now, like he can't hold it in. Maybe he can't. Maybe he really can't. "He expects me to trust him, and he's just- I don't know where he is, what he's doing." He scuffs the sand with one shoe. "I worry. Could be anything, happening out there. You know how it is these days."

"He's going out?" asks James. "Going where?"

"I said, I don't know." Sirius punches down his own little sand pile. "He's always talking about the werewolf cause, the supernatural cause, what will happen if the war spreads, on and on. He's so paranoid, he's not even talking to me. I don't want him caught up in it. All that crap. He should be here, with us. He's one of us."

"Is he?" says Peter, lightly. "Is he, really?"

Sirius feels the skin of his face go hot, and then cold. It takes every ounce of willpower to keep from murdering Peter right there on the beach, from putting him face down into that fucking sandcastle and making him eat it, until sand pours from his mouth and his nose and his eyes, and then James after him. He doesn't even know why. He can't believe the rage trembling in the small bones of his hands and wrists. He can't believe they can hold it all inside them without cracking. For a second, he can't see anything but a bare white body in the woods, and the red film over his eyes. It's not even Peter he's angry with, not Peter's fault, Peter's just playing along in this melodrama, like slipping into a robe. Sirius feels incredible rage, fury so pure it's not even a feeling at all but a void. A hole. He wants to shriek. Instead, he nods sadly. It's an inconceivable betrayal.

"I don't know anymore," he says. "I don't know if he ever was." He is the worst traitor in the known world. The most shameful. Peter looks at him without saying anything at all. James looks as if he's been slapped.

"You don't mean that," James says, finally. Sirius shrugs.

"Like I said." He stands up and dusts himself off. "I don't know. I don't want to talk about it anymore, it's not- it's nothing. It doesn't matter. Forget I said anything, would you?" He gives them an intense look. "Just forget it." James nods vigorously. Peter doesn't. "I'm going to take a walk."

He walks. He walks down the beach and then to the road and then all the way to the train station, floating on feelings he can't place. Fear of getting caught, maybe. Lingering nausea. Giddiness, at having pulled it off? Nothing feels remotely real. He slips onto the train and finds an empty compartment, curls into the seats and charms the door lock and sits in a ball, staring at his hands. They look clean but he can feel the sand under his fingernails, itching the soft flesh there. They need washing. He thinks about the waves, the sandcastle. He can count on Peter to tell everyone that story, no matter how hard James presses them all to keep silent and forget. Poor James. Poor Peter, frankly. But Sirius needs him to spill secrets, the way he always has, one after another. Peter will tell Frank and Molly and Arthur, Peter will tell Dumbledore, Peter will tell all his mates at the Pig and Pearl, Peter will tell the whole fucking universe that Remus Lupin can't be trusted, Remus Lupin is wandering off and saying who-knows-what to who-know-who and going who-knows-where. Remus Lupin is sympathetic to the wolves and the giants and the banshees, he's taking a side. Becoming a questionable sort of person. Not at all the boy we thought we knew. Sirius Black- _Sirius, of all people_ \- says so. He feels hot shame at that, but now he can't take it back. It's done. Peter will tell the Order about Remus. Oh, nobody will make a fuss about it, with an accusation as thin as that, but everything will be different. Remus won't have to be a courier any more. They'll stop sending him; they can send someone else instead. No more cross-country jaunts, risking his life. And Moody will never let Remus go to the wolves. Never, after this. He can't be sent on such a sensitive mission, not now. Sirius has changed everything, re-written the world. It's over. It's all over.

He sleeps on the train and startles awake at the last stop, disoriented and thirsty. He goes into town on the bus, finds his own neighborhood, his own street. It's surreal. There's a pub a few blocks away and he sits in a corner booth alone for a while, hoping nobody he knows sees him, writing figures onto napkins. He can go home, but he's got to be careful. He needs to arrive at the moment he left. Close the loop. He thinks about Remus's snowflake as he works. About the many worlds he's been living in, one after another, or one _before_ another, time shifting, moments stacked like boxes, collapsing; shimmering and then disappearing into each other like ripples in a pond. Each new circle containing the old world for a second, before everything dissolves completely. He charts the numbers and works out the ratios, and then does it again to be sure. In his eagerness to get back, he can't make a stupid mistake. Not when he's so close.

Just after midnight he goes outside behind the pub, by the dumpster, and takes out the time turner. It glints in his hand like treasure. He counts the spins carefully, one by one, timing them perfectly. The vertigo takes hold but he grits his teeth and lets it shudder through him, rattling his bones. Finally, it stops. The air's suddenly frigid: there's frost on the ground and ice in the cracks of the sidewalk, chimneys pumping smoke all around him. Sirius shivers and wraps his hands around his bare arms. He should have thought of that, thought of how stupid he'll look in cut-offs and a thin shirt and sandals, but oh, well. He doesn't care. It won't matter when he's home. It won't matter. He takes off through the freezing streets, skidding on chunks of slush and patches of invisible slick, his feet slapping the ground and his lungs burning. He breaks into a real run on the last block, taking the turn blindly, steam pouring from his open mouth and nostrils. He's almost home. He's running faster than he's ever run in his life. He'll unlock the door and fling it open and Remus will be there, wrapped up in a robe with a cup of tea at his elbow, worried and waiting, warm as toast, alive and beautiful and irritated and sleepy from his night shift, with a pile of books on the floor, scattered notes. He'll say, _where were you_ , and Sirius will say, _out_ , and he'll laugh, and laugh and laugh and kiss his face, and they'll crawl into bed and knock knees and Sirius will thaw under his hands, under the blankets, and he'll sleep like a dead man. And in the morning they'll stay in bed, and the world will turn around them, and Sirius will know it was all a terrible dream.

His hands are trembling but he manages to get his key into the lock. He races the stairs to the flat two at a time. He gets to the door and puts his face against it for a minute, shaking, breathing in gulps from his mouth, drinking the air. And then he unlocks it, and flings it open, and the flat is empty.

Not just empty, but _empty_. There's nothing inside. Not a stick of furniture or a scrap of carpet. No Remus and no books, no mugs of tea. Sirius wanders through the rooms, hands out for balance, because he can't seem to steady himself. There's no bed and no sofa and no dishes in the cupboards. Nobody lives here. Nobody is home. "Remus?" he says, into the dark, because he can't help himself. "Remus?" He is supposed to be under the blankets by now, putting cold toes onto warm calves. Instead, Sirius casts a warming charm and lies awake on the floor in the spot where their bed is supposed to be.

He doesn't know what went wrong. One thing, or everything.

 

 

.


	4. Chapter 4

It doesn't take long for Sirius to find himself: he is getting drunk at the Hammer & Tongs, slopping lager down the front of his shirt and telling anyone who will listen that the wheels have come off the fucking cart.

"I didn't say it," his temporal twin is slurring at a table full of frightened students. "I'd never say that, I would never've- I'd fucking never," he says, and puts his head down on the table while they slip past him, coats and bags in hand. From the other end of the bar, glamoured to look sort of like Severus Snape- if Severus Snape was a brunette with a full beard- Sirius is sitting and watching himself, feeling increasingly like he is caught in a surreal cosmic funnel. He is trapped here, stuck inside a set of nested consequences, a web he has only the barest hold on anymore.

The Sirius of now, the one before his eyes, is a miserable, sweat-soaked drunk. James and Peter and Frank are somewhere else, in a less shabby bar. They're not punishing themselves, they don't have to drink turpentine swill and complain to strangers about the fact that Remus is gone. That once the story got out about Sirius's traitorous doubts, Remus left and took all the intact soup-bowls, Remus swept off into another neighborhood and then into the shadows, pulling away from all his friends, Sirius first, Peter and James next, and Lily last, Lily always last, because they were friends first. Remus cut away all his anchors, eventually, intentionally, in order to drift. And now, according to the intoxicated and unreliable duplicate in front of him, the real Sirius has learned that Remus is missing: not just absent but vanished, disappeared from even the edges of London. So the plan was bullshit, his great idea to spare Remus the missions, the secrecy and fear. What a fucking joke. All he did was drive him into the wilderness, away from the light, from the warmth. He has probably killed Remus again, in a different way, in a different place. He's been back to the village and the woods but there's no Remus there, not like last time. No more luck. No more chance meetings. No matter what he does, then, no matter what, this is the fucking nightmare that will not end.

There's nothing to be gained from this. So Sirius leaves himself and goes out into the night, walking slowly, staring up at the stars when he can but mostly staring into lit windows, into the lamplight burning through the curtains. The shadows behind them are human. There are voices in the houses he passes, indistinct as the chatter of birds. When he was a child the house was never truly empty: he used to hear Kreacher muttering and Regulus's baby-babble from the nursery, or the airy snores of the portraits in the hall. There was never real silence. Real solitude. He has never been this alone before. He doesn't know what to do. But Remus might. So he does what Remus might do. He scrubs the glamour off, apparates to the cottage with the blue door, knocks on it with the back of his knuckles. In that one spot, the paint never seems to quite dry. Lily answers the door, and when the surprise goes off her face, she stares at him evenly for a moment. Assessing.

"James isn't here," she says.

"I didn't come to see James," he says. "I came to talk to you."

"Well, at least you're not drunk." Lily gives him a faint, sad smile. "That's something. It's late, Sirius. We can talk tomorrow. You don't look well. You ought to get home. Get some rest."

"I can't go home. I don't have a home anymore."

"Sirius-"

"I love him," Sirius says. He is crying now, leaking out of his eyes, fat hot tears that burn as they roll down. He doesn't know when that started. He can't control it anymore. "I love him, and I lost him, and I want to die."

"Oh, _Christ_ ," Lily says, and pulls the door aside, to gather him up.

 

 

 

Sirius and Remus met on the train that first terrifying, exhilarating day, but Remus and Lily met in Diagon Alley, buying second-hand cauldrons or schoolbooks, something mundane that Sirius can't remember. He can't believe he's forgotten something so important: a beginning, an origin point that the lines of their lives were drawn from. They were friends from that moment. When one of them slipped up in front of Lily and let go of Remus's secret, years later, almost to graduation, she'd laughed at them and told them that she knew, that he'd told her. Back when they were still scared children, ready to be told that they didn't belong at Hogwarts after all, that there'd been a mistake: a muggleborn and a wolf huddled under blankets, their clammy, solemn child hands clasped in a promise of friendship and silence they were both ready to take to the grave. Sirius has never begrudged Remus his love of Lily, any more than he begrudges James. She is impossible not to love.

"You've fucked up," Lily says. "You have. But everybody has, and everybody will again. That's life, Sirius. Here you go." She uncurls his clenched fingers and slips the handle of a mug of tea into them. The steam curls up into his face. "Come on, drink. The world isn't ending, we'll find a way to fix this."

"I've tried," he says. "It keeps going wrong."

"We'll try it sober this time."

"The things I said- about him-"

"I still don't understand," she says, and for a moment he sees the raw hurt cross her face. "You know him. You better than anybody." He should have thought of this- how bad it would be, how many people it would touch. Lily shakes her head, rubs her face with one hand. She leans back in her chair and looks at him, and she looks so tired. "But you were both under pressure. God knows Moody was working you hard, and he's a paranoid bastard. He's got everybody seeing shadows. I don't really even blame you. At least you can finally admit it."

"I just have to find him. I just have to explain."

"We've all tried. He doesn't want to be found." Lily sighs across the top of her teacup. "I've thought about it a lot, where he might have gone. I don't like the answers. I hope he hasn't done something foolish." Sirius feels a flare of hysteria, which he tries to drown with a swallow of tea. He knows how bad it was. How bad it could be. Somewhere else, right at this very moment.

"He could be with the wolves," he says, slowly. Lily's eyes widen, but not from shock. So she suspected already. "He was thinking about it. Trying to get them to our side." He can see her fingers tightening around the handle of her cup. He remembers another time, another meeting like this: Lily's watering eyes, her soft warnings that he should begin to think about what happens next. What happens _after_. It was kind of her, then. Maybe she was right. But he is not smart enough, not brave enough to stop. He is not letting this go. He is never letting go.

"It's possible. He's so-" she says, and stops, and wraps her hand around Sirius's sleeve. "It wasn't just you, Sirius. It wasn't just that. It was everything. It was all the whispers. They never stopped. And even when they did stop, it was like- it was like he heard them anyway, inside his own head. You know. You know what he was like. It was everything he was afraid of. He stopped getting sent away, even just to carry packages, Sirius. They had meetings without him. Even if you find him, even if we find him, it might not be enough. I don't know what would make him believe that he could come back. That there are people who desperately, desperately want him to come back." Now Lily's crying, her pale face going splotchy and red as her hair. She balls her hands into fists and puts them in front of her eyes. "God, I can't stop doing this." She scrubs at her face and then looks at Sirius. For the first time he can see the faint circles under her eyes. "I'm pregnant," she says, softly. "I'm pregnant. I found out two weeks ago." She laughs. "Isn't that perfect? We haven't even told anyone. James is so scared. And I want- I want my best friend here. It was going to be so- it was going to be perfect, all of us, we were going to be so happy-" she says, and breaks into a sob, and Sirius leans forward to wrap his arms around her. They sit like that for a moment, clinging to one another like children. She hiccups into his shoulder and pats him. "I was so angry with you. I was so livid," she says at last, muffled into the meat of him. "But I know you love him." She pushes him back a little, red-eyed, and looks him hard in the face. "I'll help you any way I can," she says. "But we have to make this right."

Lily says he can sleep in the spare bedroom, tries to insist on it, but Sirius tells her he's got something to check, which is sort of half true. He can't be found here in the morning by James, can't be asked questions he wouldn't know how to answer, or worse: be seen in two places at once. He thanks her from the bottom of his heart and then he goes back to the empty flat, which now has a _no trespassing_ sign on it. He ignores it and sleeps there again and sits on the floor in the morning, drawing lines on the floor with his wand while he thinks.

 _It was everything_ , he thinks. Everyone. Whatever he does, he's got to regain their trust in Remus. He's got to change that. But if they trust Remus- Sirius puts his face in his hands and tries to make sense of this. For a second he feels hopeless, overwhelmed, and then he has an idea.

Sirius doesn't have any paper, so he writes on the floor instead. Lists of dates and places. Lists of times, people. He puts them into columns and moves them here and there. Tries to remember the details, the moments: who was there and who wasn't, who told him what, who sent him where. When he got the owl, when he sent one off. He has to remember everything he can. Has to remember the movements, the motions. When he pulls back and stares at the floor he sees it. The pattern. The weave of all those places, all those days. And now Sirius sees the single thread he can pull.

"You're coming home," he says out loud, to the empty air. To Remus, wherever he is. A promise. There is a world where they are together, and Sirius is going to find it, or make it himself with his bare hands.

 

 

 

That first winter, the one that Sirius lived alone, the one that never happened now, Remus did a strange thing. Well, strange for somebody who'd sworn up and down they were coming home in a couple of days. Sirius only found out about it later, in the panic of ransacking Remus's flat and pulling all the dust jackets off his books and turning the rickety end tables upside down. There had been a slip of pink paper tucked into a notebook, the bottom copy of a carbon pad. A form with Remus's name and the date and an angular, hasty signature. It was a withdrawal slip. Sirius had stared at it for a long time, not understanding, and when everything had clicked it was so very terrible. It was a sign the sky had fallen in without him noticing. Remus had pulled out of school before the end of term. Dropped all his courses. As if he knew then, already, that he wouldn't be coming back, and wanted to spare everyone the hassle of any paperwork. A gesture both oddly polite and unthinkingly brutal. Sirius had crumpled it up in his hands and sat alone in the dusty silence of the flat and felt mortal, crushing fear. But there was more on that slip, below the date and the formal statement of parting ways, and that is what is going to change things, that is what this will turn on, if Sirius can turn it. A class schedule, names and numbers. It's a connection, however faint: Sirius has no idea if the Remus of now had the same fatalistic idea to drop his life running. Still, it's something.

Sirius presents himself at the college office, hair brushed, wearing a jacket he stole off a mannequin at Harrod's three hours earlier. He leans over the counter and asks to see his own file, hoping that's something muggles say in college offices. The woman at the desk barely lifts her eyes to him, just asks for identification. Sirius slides one of Remus's old gas bills over the counter.

"Sir, this doesn't count."

"Why not?" Sirius asks. "It's got my name on it."

"It's got to be a photo identification card," she says. "Otherwise, I can't release your records." She informs him about the school's policy on private information, he counters with a story about losing his card on a public bus, and when that doesn't work, Sirius casts the second _imperio_ of his increasingly criminal life. It's worth it, he thinks. It might be worth it. Because in this world, Remus John Lupin is still enrolled in _Introduction to Classical Mechanics_.

Sirius skips forward to Thursday and eats a hasty meal in the school café: two cups of tea and a cheese sandwich. Any more than that and he's afraid he'd vomit. His foot won't stop tapping against the chair leg. Just before six, he slides into the right classroom, into the back row. The room is empty otherwise. Just desks aligned neatly and a square window with a shade pulled down. There is something uncanny about it, the familiarity of the classroom, even though it's nothing like Hogwarts. No pixie skeletons and trap doors. Here the walls are drab and flat, oppressively grey, like the cinderblock hallways he wandered through outside. Though somebody is trying: they've taped up a cartoon poster of a man in a powdered wig holding an apple, and a chart of abbreviations Sirius doesn't understand. He was never paying enough attention to Remus's chatter about the laws of motion, the difference between a wave and particle, or things that sounded too fun to be scientific, like freedom and acceleration. He sits there tapping his fingers on the desk while the first students file in: they stare at him and then talk behind their hands, leaning over the gap between their desks to murmur in low voices. It's okay, he doesn't care. The classroom fills up about halfway. Some of them are older, more than a couple of years out of school: one of them is a woman who looks nearly forty, sitting by herself in the row closest to the window. She's laid her supplies out in neat rows: a cheap notebook, a pencil and an eraser, a square plastic calculator. Nobody sits at the desk next to hers, though a couple of the younger women come over to chat with her. It's as if that desk belongs to somebody else. Somebody absent. Finally the professor comes in, haggard and tweedy and sweating under his heavy coat. He takes one look at Sirius and says,

"No late registrations," and plunks his satchel down on the desk.

"I'm looking for one of your students," Sirius says. He stands up. "Remus." Out of the corner of his eye, Sirius can see a couple of students exchange glances. But only one of them makes a nervous little gesture: the woman sitting along in the far corner. She rolls her pencil up into her fingers and twists it back and forth, silently. "He's gone missing."

"Has he?" the professor asks. His eyes take in Sirius's ill-fitting jacket, his tangled hair. "I suppose you're Scotland Yard."

"I'm a friend," Sirius huffs. "If you know-"

"I know Mr. Lupin thinks it's unnecessary to attend my classes," he says. He drops his coat down onto a chair. "If you find your friend, you can tell him he's flunking. Now please, leave. These people are here to learn." Sirius looks around at the other faces in the room. Most of them don't meet his eyes. But she does, the woman with her pencils in rows. She gives Sirius a tiny nod, and then looks back down at her desk top, pretends to be staring into her notes. Sirius leaves and shuts the door behind him, then sits in the hall for the next two hours. Only a couple of people walk by in all that time, students from other classes heading for the bathroom and the water fountain. The halls are unbearably quiet. He folds paper napkins from the cafeteria into tiny frogs and charms them and lets them hop around his legs, into his hands. They flex their tiny paper legs and leap and land without a sound.

There's no chime to signal the end of class: at eight-thirty they just file out, looking even more tired than they were before, walking together in pairs or clumps of three or four, tucking books and pens away in their bags. The professor stomps out afterwards. And last is her. She looks down at Sirius, who is still sitting cross-legged on the floor.

"You must be Sirius," she says. "I'm Irene." Sirius stares at her.

"Irene," he repeats, and then he scrambles upright to shake her hand. "Sorry, I- sorry. I didn't expect you to know my name."

"He told me about you. A little. I think he felt like he had to say something. I was probably always talking about my Jeremy." She smiles, but only faintly. After a second, it slips away. "Did you say he was- missing?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry," she says, and clasps his hand back, firm, with both of hers. "I'm so sorry. This must be very hard for you. Remus is a lovely person. A lovely boy. I had- I had an operation, in the spring," she says, and her voice lowers almost to a whisper. Her hands tremble, but only a fraction. Her grip is just as strong. "I wasn't well. I thought I'd come right back afterwards, but there were- complications. Our professor told me if I couldn't pass the exam, I'd have to take the course again. I would have failed. But Remus gave me all his notes. Brought them to my house. Helped me study." Of course, Sirius thinks. The nights I complained when he was late, when he was too tired for fifth drunken game of exploding snap around the Potters' firepit. Of course. He had to be a saint, and I had to be a buffoon. Regret isn't even a strong enough word. Sirius feels that he is looking backwards into a life he barely lived. Irene goes on, patting his hands, talking about how Remus was her white knight. "I've been keeping notes for him, these last weeks," she says. "In case he comes back. He's got to come back. Such a serious boy, so hard-working. One of the hardest-working fellows I've ever known."

"That he is," says Sirius, hollowly.

"And he's not getting his post, either? I sent him a letter, after he'd been gone two weeks. I wondered if he'd gotten it." Sirius thinks about that for a moment. Thinks about the empty flat.

"What address did he give?"

"Hanbury Street," she says. Hanbury Street! Not the moon, or Scotland, or Argentina. Sirius's heart is pounding in his chest. Hanbury Street. If he's there, if he's only still there. Sirius almost laughs at how clever it is. Right in the city, in the back pockets of a million muggles. Remus is the smartest of them, really. He is alive, he has to be alive, having tucked himself away in a warehouse district that might as well be the woods. Oh, it's perfect. Sirius is not able to stop himself from lifting her hand up and pressing a single, ecstatic kiss to the back of it. "What's that for?"

"Hope," he says.

.


	5. Chapter 5

The house is like any other house on the street, and the streets nearby: squat-faced, red brick faded to brown, with thin windows peering out. The trim is shabby and peeling. Across the row, Sirius sits smoking on a stoop under an awning, pretending to read a newspaper he picked out of a rubbish bin.  He's been there for four hours, reading and waiting and circling the block, walking slowly through the alleyways. It's raining now, lightly, a fine mist wearing off the edges of the world. He's trying not to feel the panic rising in his chest, just to the bottom of his throat, like a line of water in a pool. He is trying to float above it. The last bare glow of sun is vanishing over the rooftops. Down the block, the brewery is closing up, men streaming out in pairs and clusters, slushing through the puddles and turning up the collars on their coats. Lights are coming on in the houses around him, glowing through the curtains like coals. He used to watch the world like this sometimes, waiting for Remus to come back from his classes, sitting at the window of the flat and watching his neighbors come down the block one at a time, unlock their doors, pass by laughing.

Sirius glances down at the paper for a second, eyes crossing and uncrossing over an article about an MP's secret second wife, and when he looks up again, there is a shadow turning the corner, tall and narrow and walking in a long, loping gate. His coat is old, his head is down, hair and shoulders wet from the rain. His hands are in his pockets. He doesn't look up from the bricks as he walks, except for a single quick scan of the street before he pulls his key out and puts it in the lock of the most ragged house in the row. He shuts the door behind himself and a light goes on in the hallway. Sirius sits with the end of his cigarette melting away into ash, until the ash trembles off his shaking fingers. So, that's that. This is a gentler universe after all, even though Sirius has pulled it nearly to the breaking point. Remus is alive.

Sirius is determined to keep him that way.

 

 

 

It doesn't make sense at first, the ugly squat house set amongst the factories, the odd hours Remus seems to keep. Sirius watches him on and off for nearly a week, sleeping in an abandoned shopfront across the street for a few hours whenever Remus does. He trails him to the pub and sits in a corner booth under a glamour while Remus eats thin soup and bread and drinks a single pint slowly. He follows him to the park and on a long, looping walk through the docks, and then down Knockturn Alley, watching while Remus stops and climbs the stairs to the Wyvern. He stays in there for an hour or so and when he comes out, Sirius isn't the only one tailing him. There's a man in dark robes pretending to study store windows while Remus makes his way past the used booksellers' and the potion shop, but when Remus walks on, so does he. Sirius follows them both out of the Alley, all the way through the neighborhood beyond it, to a bus stop, where Remus sits and opens a yellowing paperback and starts to read. The man watches from a distance, hands in his sleeves. Sirius waits behind the corner, wand already out at his side. But the stranger doesn't make a move: instead he stalks behind a dumpster and apparates away. When he's gone, Remus stands up, sticks the book in his bag, and walks on.

It happens twice more: Remus goes to the Wyvern after dusk, sits at the bar and eats a pie and drinks a pint and a whiskey, makes small talk with the bartender and a couple of wrinkled, sour-faced types who look as if they've grown over and around their barstools, like moss. Sirius follows him in and drinks two pints and leaves, back in his old disguise as a ginger troll. Remus wouldn't recognize it: in this lifetime he never gave it to Sirius, never taught him how to get the hairy eyebrows right. Sirius waits outside, browsing the sale racks at Moribund's, and watches Remus leave, trailed again for a couple of miles, until the guy gives up and disappears. Each time Sirius waits, white-knuckled and ready, wand in hand, for an attack that doesn't come. Someone is watching Remus. Someone else. It's a mystery until one foggy Thursday, when Sirius is sitting in the corner of the Wyvern- now his usual spot- and the stranger in dark robes slides onto the barstool next to Remus. Remus glances over at him, then goes back to eating his bowl of stew. The room is quiet enough, but Sirius still leans over and pretends to cough into his elbow, casting a quick _amplio_ on one ear. It's strong enough that he can hear someone chewing a roll at the table behind him.

"Cold night," the stranger says, to Remus. He's got his hood down, and now Sirius can see he's young, just a little younger than they are. Fresh out of Hogwarts, maybe. Or Durmstrang. Sirius doesn't recognize him, but then, he is just the sort of person Sirius would have ignored completely at school. His cheeks are concave and his shoulders slope down narrowly, giving him the look of a tense. stringy weasel. Remus is still scraping bits of carrot out of his bowl, but he nods once. The stranger's voice goes softer, so soft Sirius almost strains to hear it. "Where are your friends?" he says. Remus turns his head. Stares at him for a long moment.

"I don't have any friends," he says. It's cold and final. For some reason, it makes the other man smile.

"Cheer up," he says. "Might make some new ones." He pulls something from his pocket and thumbs it onto the bar: from across the room Sirius can see the telltale gold sheen of a galleon. "Stew's on me, mate," he says, and stands to leave. When he's gone, Remus finishes his pint and leaves the whole coin on the bar, pulling his coat over his shoulders and heading out into the dark.

That night, Sirius lies in a bed of stolen blankets in the empty house across the road, and thinks. He thinks about Remus's strange idleness, the way he keeps haunting Knockturn. He'd never have gone there before, he'd never have spent time drinking in the Wyvern, or browsing the window at Borgin's. Those were things he wouldn't, couldn't, do. _I can't_ , he told Sirius once. I can't give them a reason. I can't touch the lines they're afraid that I'll cross. Other wizards could flirt with dark magic, dark objects, dangerous corners, and nobody batted much more than an eyelash, but not Remus. His hands had to be cleaner. Spotless. The lowest cells in Azkaban aren't for wizards, after all. Sirius lies there and thinks and thinks, sick with worry, with guilt.  _Might make some new ones_. He turns those words over and over in his head until they make sense. And then they make a perfect, terrible kind of sense.

Sirius doesn't have to wait long to have his fears confirmed. The next time Remus comes out of the Wyvern, he's not alone: he walks alongside the stranger, talking quietly. At the corner they stop under a streetlight and the man holds out an envelope, drawn from his sleeve. From behind the shutter of Moribund's, Sirius watches Remus stare down between them, stiff and drawn as a tree. And then he watches Remus take the envelope and slip it into his coat. He goes on alone, catches the bus, but Sirius is already waiting for him when he rounds the corner of Hanbury Street. Sirius has apparated in a huff and now Sirius is pacing back and forth in front of his door. Fuck the time turner, fuck everything, he thinks. He's not worried about the fucking timelines anymore. At least not enough to stay away. He watches Remus slow down as he gets closer, sees him keeping his right arm loose. It's his gesture, his tell, shows he's dropped his wand down into his sleeve and is ready to draw. They stare at each other from a few yards away.

"New friends, eh?" Sirius snaps.

"Do I know you?" Remus asks. For a second Sirius is mortally offended. And then he remembers he's still glamoured as a wrinkly ginger squib.

"Fuck," says Sirius. "It's me. Remus, it's me."

"I don't-" Remus says, and then, suddenly, he does. His face does a funny thing and then goes purposefully, stonily blank. "No," he says. "Go away." It's so familiar Sirius could weep.

"Please," Sirius says. He lurches forward, grabbing hold as Remus tries to twist out of reach. "Remus, please, it's important-"

"There is literally _nothing_ you could say-"

"They'll kill you," Sirius cuts in, sharply. "You can't trust them, Remus, you can't do this." He hangs on while Remus slaps his hands away and glances around the street to see if anyone's watching. But it's the middle of the night, bitterly cold, and Remus's gin-soaked neighbors probably couldn't care less about a bit of yelling in the road. Still, Remus scowls and digs in his pocket for a key.

"I'm not doing this in the street," he says.

 

 

 

Inside, Remus tosses his bag over the end of a ratty sofa, pulls the curtains across the front windows, and mutters a charm under his breath that sends a vertiginous shiver up Sirius's spine. For a second all the air in the room seems still and dead, oppressively thick. And then it clears. There's no more outside sound, just the faintest muffled hum of industry and the road in the distance. Sirius scrubs the glamour away, feeling naked under Remus's stare. His face tingles like a healing bruise. This has all happened before, but wrong, so very wrong. He feels a strange sense of déjà vu. They had an argument like this before, so much like this one, in the room at the inn. The same angry argument over Sirius's blunt obviousness and Remus's secrets, all unraveling. Unraveling and unraveling in great handfuls. It has to go differently, Sirius knows that. He has to steer this in a better direction, he just can't quite see how. "You know better," Remus snaps, when he's finished watching Sirius pull the spell off his irritated skin. "Thoughtless, Sirius, it's thoughtless, anybody could be listening."

"You want them to listen," Sirius says. He jabs a finger in Remus's direction. "You wanted them to watch. That's why you came here, isn't it? To make sure they knew. That you were cut loose. Looking for a new side to join."

"Sirius-"

"You're using yourself as bait. Is that it? You're going to- what are you going to do? Sign a loyalty pledge, wear a badge and a mask? Go to their little meetings? Carry their packages, be their little errand boy?" Sirius crosses the room, grabs onto Remus's arm again. "How are you going to get them to trust you, Remus? How, exactly?" Remus doesn't stop him this time, just stares down, cheeks flushed with rage. Sirius slides his sleeve up, wraps his hands around Remus's bare wrist. It's shockingly warm. "Are you going to take the mark?"

"I'l do what I have to do."

"Sweet muggle _Christ_ ," says Sirius. Remus jerks his arm away.

"I thought this is what you expected," he hisses. "What was it you said? You didn't know if I'd ever been one of you? Well, now you're right. Now I'm one of them."

"They'll know you're not."

"I'm a werewolf," Remus says, bitterly. "I'm one of them whether I like it or not."

"No," says Sirius. "No. You're the kindest- you're the best person I know, you always have been," he goes on, and Remus rolls his eyes to the ceiling in disgust.

"Sirius, don't bother."

"But-"

"You've said it all before. How you'd never-"

"I did," Sirius says. "I said those things. I did." Remus stops mid-sentence, gaze narrowing down to angry slits. Sirius feels shame, hot and heavy like a brick in the middle of his chest: feels the weight of all that brutal, rigid silence. 

"Well," he says, finally. "There we are."

"I only said those things-"

"I don't care, Sirius."

"-only to keep you safe, I-" 

"I don't _care_!" Remus shouts. "I don't _care_ why! You didn't care when you said it, you didn't think about me, about-" 

"To save your life!" Sirius cries. "I said it to save your life! I did. You know how I feel! You know that I would never- I fucked up! I fucked it all up, I know! But I was trying. I said what I said because I was afraid, I was terrified, that you were going to die. I swear on my brother's grave, Remus. On Reg. I swear." Remus doesn't say anything. He looks at Sirius's face, searches it. His eyes are wild and his body is wound like a spring, fingers tightened to fists. His fists tremble.

"You're going to have to make me understand," he says, carefully.

"I knew," says Sirius. "You were going to the wolves. I had to stop it. I had to make them say no." Remus's eyes widen. Sirius would laugh at what a mirror this is, how strange it is to be saying these lines over again, except that it isn't funny. It is horribly unfunny. It's a cart rolling downhill that Sirius can't stop.

"Moody-"

"Sod Moody. I _knew_. How did you think you could keep it from me?"

"I don't know. I thought-" Remus stops, and laughs hollowly. "I thought you weren't paying attention." He's right. That is the terrible part, the awful truth. Sirius had no idea. He was wrong about everything, he let their life slip away from between his fingers. But not this time. Not anymore, not ever again.

"I was," Sirius lies. "I'm always paying attention to you." That at least is true enough: even now, even in this fight, Sirius can't take his eyes away from him, from the edges and lines of him, the places where his cheeks are still red with fury, the circles under his eyes. The shabby buttonholes that Remus has mended by hand, the way his hair falls over his forehead like soft ferns, the wind-burn on his neck from the cold. The tall proud way he stands when he's outraged, and the gentler slump when he's merely sad, and tired, and lonely. Sirius takes a step closer to him, and then another, almost holding his breath. He wants to touch him, wants to feel how good and solid and living he will be under his hands, nothing like the cold body Sirius carried through the fields, curled beside in a hole. The dog inside him, the man, both desperate for the contact. Sirius reaches out and rests his hand on Remus's middle, on the place where his chest curves ever so slightly into stomach, flesh, under his layers of clothes. It's the smallest touch. The faintest connection, but Sirius feels like he has reached through the vast dark yawn of time, through the universe itself, and set his palm down on the center. For a moment the world stops spinning. Remus doesn't bat him away or swear at him. Remus just looks down at the place where they meet, as if he's as stunned as Sirius feels. "I lied," Sirius says. "I'm sorry. You know how stupid my ideas are. I thought it would work, and it didn't, except that it did, Remus, and I can't be sorry about that. I would have said anything to keep you from going. I lied. I lied to make them doubt you, just a little, just enough. I couldn't let you go." Remus shakes his head, closes his eyes. "I won't let you go."

"You don't know," Remus says, almost in a whisper. His eyes open, and they're hard. "You don't know what it was like, to hear that."

"I am so sorry," Sirius says. Raggedly, begging. He doesn't care how pathetic he sounds anymore. He puts both hands on Remus's face, curls his fingers into Remus's hair, the split ends growing just past his ears. It's gotten longer. It's the most mundane detail and it is breaking Sirius's whole heart. "I am so sorry. I am a bloody fool-" he says, and Remus leans forward and pulls him into a kiss. It's angry for a second and then only desperate, hungrier than the wolf. They kiss and kiss and then Remus shoves him away, eyes glazed and mouth red.

"I can't stop now," he says. "I have to use this chance. If they believe that I'm truly out, that nobody trusts me-"

"I trust you," says Sirius. "Lily trusts you." Remus's smile is faint, but it's there, just barely.

"You started this," he says. "But I have to finish it. For her. For everyone. I have to make it mean something." He sets his jaw like he's afraid Sirius is going to argue with him all over again, like he is ready for the millionth round of how terrible an idea this is, like he expects Sirius to fight and fight and dig his heels in. To be fair, that is exactly the sort of thing Sirius is used to doing. But maybe that's why he can't seem to get things right. Sirius wonders if there isn't a better way. This is a whole new world, after all, in a manner of speaking.

"Alright."

"Alright?" Remus echoes.

"You have to do it," Sirius says. "Fine. But there's no sense in you doing it alone." 

"What are you going to do, defect?" He lifts an eyebrow. "You've already done that once. And spectacularly. I don't think they'll buy it."

"We'll think of something," says Sirius. "We're better together. You know it's true." Remus looks like he wants to say something biting, but he doesn't. His eyes dart away but come back to Sirius, land on him like a ray of light, like he can't help but want to look. Sirius feels a lump in his throat like a stone: it's all the words he will never be able to say, the story he will never be able to tell, even if this works. But it hardly seems to matter. He will be happy with this. He will be happy if Remus can just look at him like this, just like this. Like some things are still the same, inside. Like he hasn't forgotten how to love Sirius after all. This is already a miracle.

"I hope you're right," says Remus.


End file.
